A growing amount of information is shared through social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Initially, these types of websites were used mainly as a way to keep in touch with friends and family by sharing personal information such as status updates and uploaded photographs. Currently, social media tools are increasingly utilized for purposes beyond personal conversations, including public discourse in diverse areas, including politics, business, technology, and pop culture, as well as professional networking
Information is transferred via a relationship, or connection, such as “friending” in Facebook and “following” in Twitter. For example, Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows users to send and receive short messages, known as “tweets”, and to share and discover various topics of interest in real-time. To receive another user's tweets, a user must subscribe to, or “follow”, the other user's tweets. To receive high-quality information about a topic of interest, a user has to identify credible users whose tweets are relevant to the topic. A user is found credible based at least in part on both the expertise of the user and the trust other users have in the user, reflected in the number of followers the user has.
As there are currently over 100 million registered users of Twitter, finding the credible, or otherwise valuable, users who publish information on a regular basis can be difficult as there are no simple or efficient ways to determine which users are relevant to particular topics of interest. Twitter has introduced lists whereby users can organize the users they follow, “followees,” into groups. Third party services, such as Listorious, available at listorious.com, and MyTwitterCloud, available at mytwittercloud.com, use the created Twitter lists to index popular users based on their membership in other users' lists. The list assignments are aggregated and used to generate a ranking of users for a given tag. However, user ranking is based on the manually provided users lists, which have not been widely adopted, leading to an under representation of potential credible users. Moreover, the list categories are arbitrarily chosen by a user, which means that the topics associated with a user can be arbitrary as well, and may not reflect the actual topic of credibility of a user in the list.
Additionally, WeFollow, available at wefollow.com, allows a user to self-associate with a keyword of choice, which is then used to rank the user against other uses who have opted-in for the same keyword. However, a user has to manually opt-in to be included on a list, which means many credible sources may not be represented in the list for the particular keyword or topic. Like Listorious and MyTwitterCloud, a user may be arbitrarily associated with a particular typographical instantiation of a keyword or topic. For example, a user may associate with the term “photography” but, in turn, may be weakly associated with the term “photographer.”
Accordingly, there is a need for leveraging the existing social structure to identify relevant users associated with a particular topic of interest.